Lately I keep coming across more and more organizations that are moving away from command and control - that are changing long standing practices that folks like Drucker, Hamel, Weick, and Mintzberg, year after year, have been telling us, “they don’t work.” It’s like all of a sudden organizati...

I have been implementing Communities of Practice (CoP) since around 2000. As I have helped organizations design their own CoPs, I have learned a great deal about how to make them a real force for change and collaboration. One of the most important things I have learned is that it is the communi...

Hi Nancy, how have you been? I just came across your wonderful article via an interesting discussion on Harold Jarche's G+ post [1]. We've been talking about collective sensemaking and collaborative authoring in the context of some concerns from Harold on the usefulness of G+ for PKM. I'm involved in a "collaborative bookmaking" project [2] and some of your principles here will be very valuable! I also hope to apply some of my earlier thinking on micro-tasks and micro-roles here. Thanks for the detailed portrait of K&S, some great insights that I'll share with my friends at Change Agents Worldwide (a new venture in the making with a softer approach to Change Management [3]).
[1] https://plus.google.com/u/0/113173288673338357626/posts/DkWEkYtJHs8
[2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/100641053530204604051/posts/4AqQetEbSSa
[3] http://www.changeagentsworldwide.com/

Kessels and Smit (K&S) is a consulting firm that makes use of Collective Sensemaking to continually learn how to be more effective as a company, serve their clients better, help and support each other, and find and engage in interesting client projects. K&S is based in the Netherlands with s...

I was just thinking this morning on my subway ride reading the Ikaria article, "who in my network will pick this story up?".. and here it is! Thanks, Robert! It also talks about the importance of "social structure", ways to add meaning to life. I hope our virtual communities and conversations can achieve this (the "tribes" or "Islands" you mention), so we don't need to move..although, I'm now inclined to!

Hugh McLeod say it all in this Cube Grenade which part of a collection that you can buy - I bought one for my son. It is the central message I think of our time and of my book You Don't Need a Job - You Need a Network But I also think that Hugh's message could also say there is "No health in ...

Thank you for your encouragement, Nancy! I know the Managment Innovation EXchange well and as it so happens, they just opened a new HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge! Here's my submission, hope you and your readers can vote me up!
http://www.mixprize.org/hack/filling-positions%E2%80%A6-matching%0B-roles

As Knowledge Management professionals our job is the help organizations leverage their knowledge. Our attention is focused on the knowledge worker and our major task is to devise ways for those knowledge workers to share the knowledge they have gained with their peers. In other blog posts I have ...

Hi Nancy, now you got me thinking... I've put together an interpretation here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uk6YYsAHt0aLAED9KN3cCywsz8qcx_rM0BjKzzUaC6E/edit
which meant to be brief, but then got longer and longer... enjoy!

As Knowledge Management professionals our job is the help organizations leverage their knowledge. Our attention is focused on the knowledge worker and our major task is to devise ways for those knowledge workers to share the knowledge they have gained with their peers. In other blog posts I have ...

Great reading, Nancy, as always! I was just looking at tasks as well, and how they relate to talent. If we were to marry those two in a networked organization (one that would allow for tasks to be more dynamic and "owned" based on the right skills), we'd be much better off as compared to the static HR competency frameworks that create ready-made boxes for positions. Here's my latest thinking on this:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100641053530204604051/posts/BHL3LRfd4Xr

As Knowledge Management professionals our job is the help organizations leverage their knowledge. Our attention is focused on the knowledge worker and our major task is to devise ways for those knowledge workers to share the knowledge they have gained with their peers. In other blog posts I have ...

[Three years ago today I posted A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World. In classic Hagelian fashion it was long and complicated. With the help of a few edge collaborators (Christopher Gong, Sarah Scharf and John Seely Brown), we've managed to simplify the Manifesto into some powerful imperatives...

In this video I describe the Three Eras of knowledge management that I have previously written about on this blog, Where Knowledge Management has Been and Where it is Going – Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. My understanding about the third era continues to grow so I have elaborated the third ...

I've been waiting for an update of the 3-era-KM model and here it is! Wonderful! It inspired an update of one of my models over at G+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/100641053530204604051/posts/GAg6VFoBY3P

In this video I describe the Three Eras of knowledge management that I have previously written about on this blog, Where Knowledge Management has Been and Where it is Going – Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. My understanding about the third era continues to grow so I have elaborated the third ...

How wonderful, Nancy. If you can get people to *dramatically* change their habits by changing the workplace configuration so that it enables "structured socialization" (interesting wordplay), then this can be a stepping stone towards enabling more conversations in a virtual space. We're not there yet, much has to be improved (including tools and skillsets - Luis Suarez and I just talked about Critical Thinking as one - http://www.elsua.net/2012/07/10/productivity-tips-on-presentations-inform-inspire-and-motivate/). Maybe soon the rest of the office space will transform into a Researcher's Square and separate offices become the exception. Soon, employees will think about how to remove the location boundaries from the square and open up the conversation to the outside world.

A number of years ago I wrote an article, “The Hallways of Learning” published in Organizational Dynamics, in which I suggested that we might look at the creative, open ended conversations we have in the hallways of our organizations as a metaphor for the kind of conversations we need in the many...

Thank you for this excellent summary, Bill. Wish I was there this time. On your last point "Make everyone a teacher", here's a chart I had put together earlier: https://plus.google.com/u/0/100641053530204604051/posts - this is a critical piece if you want to raise the collective knowledge of the organization.

I am pleased to be back for my sixth Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here is a link to a summary of last year’s notes - This is the first set of notes. There will be many more to follow. I attended workshop hosted by Mike Gotta - Organization Next: Bridging the Participation Gap – Networks,...